Deeper into the collective subconsciousness all the while assured of individuality and rugged independence. Too good to give it up and too obviously fucked up to care. Living in the shadows of an ever-twitching and surreal world. Spastic shadows and half-formed exclamations. People who can't take jokes and people who can't stop making them, both uniting to ruin the moment. Uneasy words from agitated people. More data every second than can be processed in a human lifetime. Everything is under control, believe us. There is a number too big to fit into the known universe, and we are chasing it for no other reason than to crowd ourselves out. We are edging towards an eternal dream state, towards a hyped self destruction, into the darkness of the final delusions.
Pretentious shit from idiots, too, and pretty much absolutely as far as the eye can see or ear can hear. Why won't the voices stop, right? They don't appear to even consider your objections for a moment before saying some other thing, or a thing related to it logically. Or is it the appearance of logic, worn as a cloak over a disingenuous appeal to base instinct? Then, to add injury to insult, other voices begin to chatter nonstop about the things the first order voices said. A chorus grows in the uncanny valley of the present, a maelstrom of misinformation and ignorance grows and risks everything and stupefies the remainder. Dangerous ideas curl in the air like toxic smoke. Plumes of oil, plastic, radiation and particulates in the air will sustain the next apex lifeform... our Frankenstein will sail among the stars and tell exaggerated tales about its creators.
Meanwhile, on the internet: the Russian version of Pam from The Office has got everyone's* attention and won over their hearts, becoming a meme in less time than it takes me to take a shit in an airplane bathroom. Kind of a turn for the weird there, in an already weird piece. Never mind that. Various people (*mostly or entirely internet males) are very smitten with this instant character, this immediate meme. It is probably the thing we will take away from this whole confrontation... a woman in Crimea is so darn cute just kinda like that lady... from the NBC TV show. There's the depth of my analysis of this cultural moment. Whatever – it's sub mainstream at best, no better than any of the ongoing, epoch defining stories of this young and troubled century.
Billions of online videogame deaths, testimony to human achievement and imagination – a titan even among the momentous spires of history, from the dawn of life to the promethean acts of the distant paleolithic, to the moon landing, and maybe a little bit further with the advent of microcomputing (printing press level shit), until widespread adoption ruined the the already poor state of the internet. My K/D ratio is fine, thanks for asking... sometimes it is even positive. A digital battlefield full of mindless drones; mindful drones in the battlefields (a one-sided misnomer) of reality, blowing up children and their suspicious parents in the name of peace. We suffer so sublimely in the name of peace, and forbear nothing. An online battle rages as well... many of them, probably. I don't even know. I'm just the moon-eyed prophet rambling wildly in lyrical arabesques, not an expert. My pupils swell with chemical potential. A generally ignored part of the scenery. Google me.
My friends, please do not become internet people. I have seen the changes wrought on many... hypersensitivity, paranoia, the battling of overblown or imaginary enemies, strong connections to magical thinking and empty identities, belief in blatant lies spread by ignorant or malicious idiots, online-tribalism, immense and burning anger over small things. Wars-waged-willfully.com. It's more raging than lolling. The incipient world without humor. Many fall prey to a simpler worldview when they become internet people. You'd think, what with access to more information than any other human at any other time in history, they'd develop more complex and nuanced ideas of the world, but the exact opposite tends to happen as they build little dens of broken thoughts and fallacies and fears and hatreds around themselves, and peek out only to shout at others. The lies in particular are growing more complex. The dream of a scientifically literate world population is sinking into the mire.
Pinterest but it makes you dumb and sells you nothing but nostrums and consumerism and weakens the user by corralling it into a little box of referents. The immune system of the mind compromised by viral marketing, by too much time online, by a phantasm ruled by perverts, experts, the mentally ill, and their consensus. Amazon but more now, more products, and a reward system for honest reviewers. 24/7 news cycle but personalized, with even more hysterical and damaging results. Facebook but more like Snapchat, with nothing kept for posterity. No metadata sales, no incursions into privacy, no predictive algorithms – lol, what a dream. User driven but not user friendly. Users... drugs... internet... sicknesses spreading. First world horror stories - someone please make this site and fill it with the stories I can only vaguely recall (stories of fattened and wasteful infidels, of childlike blissful consumers, mountains of plastic, of the struggle to exist being flattened and distorted by unreal forces, human potential casually wasted), but that still haunt my idle moments and seep into pleasant reflections in the sun, even when I'm disconnected they find me. I was not made to suffer so.
I have been intermittently privy to the internet since 1996. You have to trust me when I say I've seen it change more than I could've imagined at that distant, almost quaint time, when most people had to log into the internet using a loud 14.4-56k baud modem (a stone-aged device that transmitted and received computer information over phone lines). Some changes are very welcome, like the piratical freedom of information, proliferation of high bandwidth, or... uh, well nearly nothing else but a handful of belly laughs and a handy way to keep in touch with friends, or painless banking with only mild fears of getting compromised. Heems was right: the internet is full of spies. I am beginning to think we will look back on the internet (possibly within my lifetime) as a big mistake, as a lost cause... even now it does a lot of harm, allows a lot of noxious and damaged people an outlet for behavior and thought that should be strongly discouraged by the rest of the herd. Not to mention the looming promise of a corporate/government takeover or an attempt by either force to dominate the internet they already kind of own, barring all activity that they find unprofitable or 'too free for democracy'. Our descendants will look back with undisguised hostility to this waning golden era, and we will have to admit we lost control. Nothing was under control anymore, everything was part of a self-regulating post modern ecosystem of action and distraction, nobody seemed to care, and nobody had the courage to turn off the machines and breathe in silence.
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